What Does Kesko's Integrated Data Balance Sheet Teach Us About Data Leadership?

Data and AI are the driving forces executing the strategy of one of Northern Europe's largest retail operators. Kesko's Integrated Data Balance Sheet demonstrates how data leadership and utilization generate growing value year after year for various stakeholders. What does Kesko do differently than others?

Kesko's Integrated Data Balance Sheet makes competitive advantage based on data and AI capabilities visible to investors and other stakeholders.

Lesson 1: Data Is Not a Resource But Capital with an Expected Return and Risk Profile

The most important lesson of Kesko's Integrated Data Balance Sheet is that in successful companies, data and AI capabilities are managed with the same logic and standard as any other strategic capital. Decisions on where to invest, what returns to expect, and how risks are taken and managed are made from the perspective of business and competitive advantage.

Kesko approaches the core question by justifying its key data and AI choices from the perspectives of business, sustainability, and shareholder value creation. The Data Balance Sheet describes how investments in data and AI capabilities support the best customer experience, sales growth, operational efficiency, and build data-driven competitive advantage.

In Kesko's data strategy, the data foundation ensures security, while the service level transforms technology into visible competitive advantage.

Simultaneously, it outlines the strategic risks tied to data and digital operations and how they are managed. This aligns data alongside the key factors influencing Kesko's value creation.

The Data Balance Sheet proves that data-driven intangible assets can be made visible, even if they cannot be recorded on a financial balance sheet, with few exceptions. Visibility into data and the investments tied to its utilization supports long-term value creation and competitive advantage.

Our Integrated Data Balance Sheet and data balance concretize the intangible, data- and AI-capability-driven competitive advantage and strategic value creation for owners and investors. Special perspectives include the role of data in the business model, as well as the strategic opportunities and risks connected to data. Hanna Jaakkola, Vice President, Investor Relations at Kesko

Lesson 2: The Use Case Is the Fundamental Unit of Data Leadership

In many companies, data and technology leadership flies high in the clouds while simultaneously diving deep into technical details. Discussing concrete business benefits connects these altitudes, but despite a good start, the conversation often quickly diverges into platforms, capabilities, and future readiness on one side, and systems, applications, and process sub-optimization on the other.

Kesko's data balance concretizes for management and investors how raw data (data capital) is refined through strategic leadership into value-producing services and products (data assets).

The conversation stays on the right level only when both altitudes meet around the same question: what single business outcome does this data produce, for whom, and when. At Kesko, data leadership does not operate in a separate corporate CDO function but as an integral part of commercial operations and digital services. This keeps management focus tightly on what data use cases deliver to the customer, the retailer, and the business.

Over the years, Kesko’s data capital has been built into a strategic asset whose value is realized in business and customer encounters every day. Every use case and technological choice is based on business rationale and concrete benefits. Minna Vakkilainen, Senior Vice President, Marketing, Data & Digital Services at Kesko.

This leads to two strong principles of data leadership:

• First, every data and AI use case has a business owner committed to the value it produces.

• Second, data discussion takes place around a shared value-creation map.

The map can have many levels, but they all describe the same business. The Data Balance Sheet makes visible how these two principles have been realized during the year.

Lesson 3: Trust Is the Prerequisite for Data Sharing

The business logic described above materializes on one, often hidden condition: the trust of people and stakeholders that data is handled and utilized responsibly. Without trust, data is not shared. Without shared data, competitive advantage is not created. Data responsibility is part of a broader mechanism through which data transforms into strategic capital.

When data is managed as strategic capital, a one-way loyalty program deepens into data-driven interaction that creates concrete value in the customer's everyday life.

In Kesko's Integrated Data Balance Sheet, responsibility integrates into the value creation model. Sharing the value produced by data, returning value to customers, privacy, cybersecurity, and the ethical use of AI collectively describe how Kesko earns its right to utilize data. Individuals' trust in the realization of these premises is a central prerequisite for sharing data between the individual and Kesko. When data responsibility is linked to value creation, it transforms from a strategic risk into a competitive factor.

In Kesko's data responsibility, the starting point is protecting the individual's data and its responsible utilization in business, as well as creating shared, positive impacts for the customer, stakeholders, and society. Noomi Jägerhorn, Sustainability Director at Kesko

Lesson 4: The Process Reveals Maturity

The greatest value of the Integrated Data Balance Sheet does not stem from the final outcome but from the process by which it is built. The facilitated preparation by Functos brings to the same table people who do not work together daily: business management, data experts, architects, compliance, IT, risk management, the sustainability function, and investor relations. The shared question of how data produces value now and in the future sparks insights that arise nowhere else.

This results in two long-term benefits. Directing data strategy and developing a data culture do not happen in training sessions or meetings, but when the organization is forced to look at the big picture outside its own silos. Second, the fluidity of the process itself is a sensor of data culture maturity. If the process feels difficult, it reveals something. If it runs smoothly, the organization is already advanced.

A recurring process turns a single report into a series. A single report is a snapshot. A series is a mirror of development and the effectiveness of strategy. The Board and management can see something in the series that a single document cannot reveal: whether the data strategy is consistent, if capabilities are developing as promised, and if changes (the breakthrough of AI, new regulations, competitors' moves) are reacted to correctly and on time.

This also places the first Data Balance Sheet in the right light. It should not be planned to be perfect, but to be continued.

The best insights emerge when people sit down around the same question for the first time, or around a new question regularly. The Integrated Data Balance Sheet process makes this encounter possible and repeatable. Mikko Merisaari, Author of Functos's Integrated Data Balance Sheet and Lead Strategic Advisor.

You Only Get Ready by Starting

"We are not ready yet" is by far the most common sentence we hear in our discussions with organizations considering a Data Balance Sheet. This is more often a reason to start than a reason to wait for something finished. Data and AI maturity is not built before the Data Balance Sheet but through it.

Kesko's five-year arc shows that a finished Data Balance Sheet is not something that can be planned perfectly in advance. It is something that always describes new territories to be conquered.

Kesko's Integrated Data Balance Sheet 2025

How does one of Northern Europe’s largest retail operators make the value of data and AI visible to investors?

Read the annoucencement on Kesko's Investor Pages Direct link to the report (pdf)

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the Integrated Data Balance Sheet?

The Integrated Data Balance Sheet is a strategic framework developed by Functos that makes a company's data and AI capabilities visible and measurable capital for CXO leadership, investors, and other stakeholders.

How does Kesko utilize the Integrated Data Balance Sheet framework?

Kesko uses the framework to make visible how data and AI investments enable strategic objectives and support customer experience, sales growth, and operational efficiency, integrating data deeply into their strategic value creation process.

About the writer

Mikko Merisaari is a founding partner of Functos and the method developer of the Integrated Data Balance Sheet. (mikko.merisaari@functos.fi) Kesko's Data Balance Sheet is based on the Integrated Data Balance Sheet framework developed by Functos Oy.